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During the eighties, there were a lot of people, including myself, who could read directly the hex codes of the Z80 instructions as easily as its symbolic assembly language.

That was very handy for reverse engineering programs like the Microsoft CP/M BASIC interpreter or FORTRAN compiler.

Yeah but that would have been the late 70's... oh my gosh that was 1991!

It was cool to do that kind of stuff, you knew exactly what your program was doing (if all went right) at all times, but it sure was a slog to get anything complex moving.

RE "....assembling programs by hand and punching hexcodes into a board......"

You translated you assembly language to machine language. ( Machine language is the only language a CPU can understand. )

Yes 'assembling' is exactly what GP did when they converted e.g. `LD A, B` into 0x78.

I wouldn't call it a 'translation'. It's encoding. (We don't think of converting between ASCII codes and symbols as translation.)